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S.K. Gupta interviewed for robotics story in <i>The Economist</i>

S.K. Gupta interviewed for robotics story in The Economist

Professor S.K. Gupta (ME/ISR) is cited in an article in The Economist about current breakthroughs and the coming ubiquity of robotics:

“S.K. Gupta, a robotics researcher at the University of Maryland who is currently running the National Robotics Initiative at America’s National Science Foundation (NSF), sees ROS and the like not just as solutions to specific problems but as developments that are reshaping the field. Robotics used to be hard to do because to make even a poor robot you had to be good at a whole lot of different things: artificial intelligence, building manipulators, engineering joints and wheels, electronics and so on. As a result, academic robotics research has generally been concentrated at universities that already have a flourishing robotics programme with capabilities across the board, such as Carnegie Mellon, MIT and the University of Tokyo. Now a small team with a fresh insight in a single area—making hands, say, or machine-learning—can use ROS and reasonably cheap hardware to put together a robotic system on which to try out its ideas without being expert in any of the other areas involved. Perhaps as a consequence, the first funding round for the initiative Mr Gupta oversees produced applications for $1 billion in grants, more than 20 times the amount eventually awarded.”